perlmeditation
zby
I guess this is a good poll idea - but first we need to gather all the options.
<p>
<a href="http://blog.timbunce.org/2008/03/08/perl-myths/">Stats show that Perl is not dead</a> and has still strong presence everywhere. But I am sure that everyone noticed that it has lost the place in public imagination. It does not inspire people (as Ruby with RoR or PHP with Drupald and Mediawiki do) any more.
<p>
So what do you think can bring back the excitement into Perl?
<p>
Here is a list of things (that are very exciting to me personally) but which in my opinion will not be exciting outside of Perl community:
<ul>
<li> Catalyst? I don't think so. It is great - flexible and all, but it is just another MVC framework.
<li>DBIx::Class (and RDBO)? Very nice and perhaps the most powerful of all Open Source ORMs - but again - nothing new
<li>Moose? Yeah - this might be exciting inside our Perl world, but outside?
<li>Jifty? I don't know much about that one - but see Catalyst above.
</ul>
And what can do that?
<ul>
<li>Perl 6 - obviously. Just when?
<li>[id://674541|CPAN and the ecosystem around it]. CPAN has been here for more than a decade, but it is only recently that we noticed problems with it's scale and started to do something about that. And this massive scale is something really new in OS code libraries.
</ul>
What are your types?
<p>
<b>Update:</b> And what really makes the mentioned Drupal and RoR libraries exciting? With Drupal non-programmers can set up a quite complex community site on their own, without hiring expensive programmers. Paradoxically this creates also a big market for PHP programmers who later are hired to add new features to the already working community sites. With RoR it is the other way around - it let's a lonely programmer create a nice looking web application without hiring designers. This independence in both cases is quite a breakthrough and creates excitement and buzz.
<p>
The question why we need buzz for Perl I'll leave unanswered for now.